A raised rim on a drumlin, a circle of trees where the hedgerows break. The rath at Ballindrimna, in County Galway, offers almost none of that. Sitting in low-lying grassland, it survives as a roughly circular enclosure of around forty metres in diameter, defined by a bank that has worn so low on its western and northern sides that no trace of it remains visible above ground at all. What is left is, in technical terms, poorly preserved, which is a measured way of saying that the site asks something of the eye.

Raths, or ringforts, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. They were enclosed farmsteads, the bank and sometimes an outer ditch serving as much to mark territory and manage livestock as to defend. Thousands were built across the country, and thousands have been reduced by centuries of ploughing, drainage, and land improvement. The Ballindrimna example fits a familiar pattern along the western seaboard, where low-lying fields have been worked hard and early earthworks have gradually dissolved back into the landscape. What survives on the eastern and southern arc is enough to confirm the outline, if not to impress at a glance.